Zaha Hadid Architects to build Sberbank technopark at Skolkovo

The architectural bureau of Zaha Hadid, the award-winning British architect who died last month, has won a design competition for the Sberbank technopark building that is due to be built at the Skolkovo Innovation Centre, Sberbank president German Gref announced this week.

The giant Sberbank technopark is due to be built over the next few years on an area of 7.83 hectares, and will house 10,000-12,000 people working in the state banking behemoth’s technology and marketing departments, among others, in about 131,000 square metres of space.

“They are the people who will be responsible for all the bank’s ‘substance’ – its technical content, its brains,” Gref said at the competition results ceremony.

Zaha Hadid, who designed award-winning buildings around the world, died last month. Photo: Flickr.

Gref said the building’s final design would take about a year to complete, after which a tender would be held to select a contractor, which is expected to take several more months.

“It’s realistic to start building work in 18 months’ time, and experience suggests the building will take another two years to complete,” he said, adding that it was too early to set a price tag on the technopark’s construction.

The Iraqi-born Hadid, who often said she was inspired by the Russian avant-garde, became the first female winner of the prestigious Pritzker prize for architecture in 2004. She died on March 31 at the age of 65 from a heart attack in a Miami hospital where she was being treated for bronchitis.

Her designs, with their trademark undulating curves, elicited mixed reactions, with some saying her design for a stadium in Qatar resembled a giant vagina. Moscow is already home to one building designed by Hadid: the Dominion Tower business centre in southeast Moscow, which was completed last year. Her buildings can be seen around the world, from the U.K. and U.S. to China, Seoul and Azerbaijan.

Hadid had personally worked on the design for the Sberbank technopark, said Gref.

“It’s her last project that she finished work on,” he said.

The other architectural firms competing to design the technopark were the Russian company Speech, the U.K.’s Foster + Partners, the U.S.’s Eric Owen Moss Architects and Italy’s Fuksas.